Description
Building on my ongoing research on the international thought of Indian women envoys in mid twentieth century, this paper explores the questions of war, peace,nationalism and larger international vision of early Indian women leaders like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Lakshmi Menon, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur to name a few. Did Indian women nationalist leaders actively think of a future foreign policy for independent India? What were their ideas of interstate relationships? How did nationalism converse with the transnational solidarities and the world visions of the transnational anti-imperial women’s movement? What were the voices left out of the conversation thus throwing light upon the epistemology of independent India’s foreign policy? Looking for lost possibilities of anti-imperial state feminism, this paper borrows the idea of ‘useable history’ (Delap, 2020) to look at the formative years of Indian foreign policy and women’s narratives therein to explore the possibilities of a feminist foreign policy future. To this effect the study excavates foreign policy beliefs of elite women leaders employing the tools of feminist historiography and attempts for a gendered theorization of foundational years of Indian foreign policy.
